To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) – R. Mulligan

I’ve never read the book (by Harper Lee) and perhaps I should.  I suspect it captures the nostalgic feeling of childhood memories of “events of significance” even more than the movie does.  And the movie does a very nice job of showing us a grown-up world through a child’s eyes, a grown-up world where things are unfair and people are treated badly because of the colour of their skin.  It is small-town Alabama in the early 1930s and the children are Scout, a six-year-old girl, and Jem, a ten-year-old boy, and they are the children of grown-up lawyer Atticus Finch, played by a dignified Gregory Peck.  He’s a widower with a deep sense of justice who is called upon (and agrees) to defend black Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) who has been accused of raping a white girl.  Of course, the odds are stacked against them and the racism of the town is such that Robinson needs to be protected from lynching from the same sort of men who are later sitting on the jury.  Yet, we believe in Robinson, and in Finch. as wholeheartedly as his children do, and we see the girl’s father, Bob Ewell, as the true villain, almost an embodiment of evil here.  But the movie is not all serious and we also see the children enjoy themselves, daring each other to run up and touch the door of a spooky nearby house where rumour has it that “Boo” Radley, a shut-in young man (who represents a sort of Bogeyman) lives and who may be dangerous (or perhaps not, since he may be leaving small gifts for the kids).  The plot ultimately weaves a number of different strands together into a satisfying whole, even as it avoids any semblance of a happy ending that would claim to have solved the problem of racism.  Off in the future, from the standpoint of the narrator (a grown-up Scout), these events still seem significant – and the effect of the book and the movie on American society, perhaps more significant still.  Yet, more cultural advances would be needed before we would begin to hear black voices telling their own stories rather than having white advocates speak for them (inside and out of the movies).